The City Council voted this morning to extend the city's drug- and prostitution-free zones despite concerns that an oversight committee studying the zones is "dysfunctional" and includes too many people with a vested interest in the policing tool to give the mayor and city commissioners a balanced recommendation.

City Council members first established the zones 15 years ago to give police another tool to fight crime in certain neighborhoods. Under current rules, officers can arrest suspected drug offenders and exclude them from neighborhoods in central, Northeast and east Portland for 90 days. The exclusions stand even if the criminal charges don't.

Last year, Mayor Tom Potter --a former police chief --and the City Council added an oversight panel and raised the standard of proof for the exclusions from suspected drug offense to "probable cause." The exclusions now must be issued with an arrest.

Since the new rules took effect, city figures show African Americans have been disproportionately hit by exclusions. That's got city commissioners worried that the zone concept needs more work.

Today, the mayor asked his colleagues to extend the zones, set to expire Friday, until the end of September to give the oversight committee more time to study statistics from the zones and make recommendations about potential changes. But that study has been hampered, even the mayor's aides admit, by squabbling among study committee members and the slow release of statistics by the Police Bureau. The City Council voted to create the study group a year ago, yet members only started meeting in February.

Commissioners Erik Sten and Randy Leonard both said they'd heard concerns that the committee was making little progress. Sten questioned the makeup of the committee, which includes prosecutors and public defenders.

"One cannot effectively oversee one's own work," he said. "An oversight committee can't be the people who actually do the work."

In the end, Leonard voted with Commissioners Dan Saltzman and the mayor to extend the zones until Sept. 30. Sten voted against the zones, effectively killing them for a month because the extension had been an emergency ordinance, which requires a unanimous vote. But after getting his "no" vote on the record, Sten moved to reopen the vote and gave Potter the courtesy "yes" he needed to keep the zones in effect until fall.

"I do think the zones are valid tools," he said, "... I just want to make sure we're doing them the right way."